The commoditisation of corporate comms

Some of the luckiest people I’ve worked with earn more than the prime minister of a medium-sized country producing communications almost nobody reads, remembers or acts upon. For years, large organisations could absorb this inefficiency because they were never truly under pressure to evolve. Endless slide decks, safe campaign language, committee-approved messaging and oceans of polished corporate content continued because the system rewarded activity rather than impact. Communications functions became highly efficient production engines, but often poor judges of originality, emotional resonance or commercial value.

Many people succeeded not because they possessed exceptional creative judgement, but because they understood how to survive within consensus-driven environments. The safest slide won. The least offensive headline survived. The idea that upset nobody became the strategy. In many corporations, the ability to navigate politics quietly became more valuable than the ability to create something memorable.

That era is ending.

AI changes the economics of execution

GenAI has altered the economics of creative work almost overnight. McKinsey estimates that AI could automate up to 70% of activities associated with knowledge work, dramatically accelerating content production across industries. Suddenly the ability to generate copy, resize assets, summarise reports, localise messaging and produce competent campaign materials is no longer rare or expensive.

The uncomfortable reality for many communications teams is that execution itself is rapidly becoming commoditised. AI tools can already generate respectable headlines, social posts, presentations and visual concepts in seconds. Research into AI-assisted marketing communications consistently points toward significant gains in speed, efficiency and scale. The production advantage many organisations once relied upon is disappearing far faster than most people inside those systems realise.

But competence is not originality. And volume is not influence.

Why judgement becomes the premium skill

As execution becomes cheaper, judgement becomes dramatically more valuable. Yet many communications environments still reward output over discernment. More campaigns. More channels. More internal content. More noise. The assumption persists that visibility equals effectiveness, despite growing evidence that audiences are increasingly overwhelmed, selective and sceptical.

At the same time, people are becoming surprisingly sensitive to work that feels emotionally empty or algorithmically assembled. Research into AI-generated marketing content already highlights growing concerns around authenticity, trust and emotional credibility. Audiences may not always know why something feels generic, but they instinctively recognise when nobody with genuine perspective shaped it.

That is why taste matters again.

Taste is an awkward concept in corporate environments because it resists measurement. It cannot easily be reduced to dashboards, engagement metrics or quarterly reporting language.

Yet the best creative leaders have always possessed an unusually refined instinct for emotional timing, cultural relevance and audience psychology. They know when an idea feels alive. They know when messaging sounds frightened. They know the difference between something technically competent and something genuinely memorable.

Most importantly, they know what to reject.

The coming exposure of mediocrity

In an AI-saturated world, this becomes extraordinarily valuable. When everybody can generate twenty campaign concepts in thirty seconds, the differentiator is no longer ideation alone, but discernment. Choosing the one idea worth pursuing. Understanding human behaviour deeply enough to know what will resonate emotionally rather than simply function algorithmically.

Ironically, AI may end up exposing how little genuine creative judgement existed in some communications functions all along. Once execution becomes democratised, hierarchy becomes harder to justify. Expensive teams producing forgettable work become more visible. Safe language becomes easier to spot. Mediocrity loses its camouflage.

The future will not belong to the people who can produce the most content. AI will handle that effortlessly. It will belong to the people with perspective, curiosity, courage and creative instinct. The people capable of making sharper decisions in a world drowning in infinite mediocre output.

AI didn't make creativity irrelevant, it made taste expensive again.